All That You Can Be
by Caira
Summary: Why *are* the Powers That Be so damn powerful?


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SOMEWHERE IN OR NEAR ANCIENT GREECE 

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They had it. 

The key. 

What every human being had been looking for since the first caveman hit another over the head with a big rock and declared himself Supreme Ruler of the Known World (then a couple of valleys, but the thought was there). 

The two of them had it. 

Absolute power. 

Omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, and quite a lot of other words beginning with omni. 

The first meant they could crush any and all gods which came their way. The second meant they could go to the gods rather than waiting for them to come. The third meant they knew there were never any to crush in the first place. 

Needless to say, the first thing they did was storm into the nearest heaven and demand to see the manager. A god's just a demon with better publicity and a larger-than-normal ego, and therefore easy to defeat and no fun for the pair. Heaven and hell are just names for quite a number of spare dimensions left over from what's variously known as the Big Bang, the Beginning, and the Prelude to the Existence of several dozen self-appointed holy men. There's quite a lot of them, mostly remote empty ones ideal for the first time omnipotent. After creatively informing a few convenient all-powerful thunder gods that maybe they weren't so powerful after all, they settled into one. 

After decorating their new dimension, borrowing heavily from the Golden Rectangle and pillars designs in favour at the time, the newlygods (after all, they reasoned, we're a hell of a lot more powerful than what those idiot mortals worship, and if any of those deluded demonic bastards want to complain, what are they going to do, bash us to death with the sacrificial altar?) decided to go and check out the local night life. 

Or lack thereof. Zeus (actually a thirty-centimetre troll demon with a stomach ailment, whose rumbling had given him the whole thunder god idea) had banned all the decent entertainment after the great fiasco otherwise known as the Trojan War. So they went home, where they built what resembled a theatre, and made it a window to the entire history of the world, starting with the rapidly-condensing disc of dust and gas that would become the Solar System. Whenever it got boring, they threw peanuts at the "stage". What, you thought all those mass extinctions were caused by asteroids? 

Just as it was getting to a really interesting bit involving the Colossus of Rhodes, a few drunk philosophers and a bottle of spray charcoal, one of them noticed a ritual apparently aimed at that minor thunder "god" (who had about ten worshippers left alive) which they had impaled on a lightning rod, who happened to go by the name of Pahwa-da'bi. They answered the ritual at home, gratefully accepted the gift (a dozen bottles of finest-vintage red -- nothing that they couldn't have made themselves, but they were already getting lazy) and asked the bloke what he wanted. 

It was then that they decided to oversee the power of virtue in its all-encompassing, everlasting battle against, well, evilness. It wasn't that the man was any great warrior of the good, since what he was asking for was essentially some cosmic grandfather to buy it with his name at the top of the will. To put it another way, he owed Aphalos of Delphi seven thousand drachma at intelligent interest (i.e. whatever amount Aphalos thought he could get) after a bad day at the wrestling. 

They shrugged their shoulders and gave him the cash, not out of any moral obligation -- they *did* have morals, but they were so far removed from the average that they rarely became an issue. No, they gave it to him because Aphalos, after a bad day at the pentagram, happened to be possessed by a rather conservative demon. 

Like all conservatives, this demon was a firm believer in the rights of the individual to exploit any and all individuals in his or her (but usually his) power, and the easiest way for a demon to do that was to bring about some form of Armageddon... after all, what fun's a party if you don't have any mates there? Besides, the demon's natural form had no obvious orifices to put a lightning rod through. This rather annoyed our couple, so naturally they decided to put a slow and painful end to his activities -- quite without noticing that they had saved the life of not only the local Slayer but quite a number of whatever the Ancient Greeks called White Hats in the process. 

As the days went by, they discussed the infinity of reality and how bloody boring it all was, answered the rituals, and eventually realized that they rather enjoyed helping these White Hats. It wasn't as if they had consciences to placate, but the good guys tended to be less selfish, therefore giving better gifts, and, as a bonus, didn't turn up smelling of goat's blood. Well, not very often, anyway. Meanwhile, their reputation among the virtuous grew for reliability, trustworthiness, efficiency and wisdom (read: the ability to convey what is common knowledge or meaningless in such a way that the average person never fully understands it, and therefore assumes the conveyor is far more intelligent than s/he is), and in any case the not-so-virtuous usually preferred to go to demons, and such problems were easily... well... fixed. 

So, for thousands of years, they went on, never redecorating their dimension however bad the situation looked for the culture they copied it off, and kept on answering the rituals. When the couple got more bored than usual, they'd find some young demon, brainwash it, and send it down into the world "to even the score between good and evil". And they never changed the name, regardless of the dominant language, reasoning that it couldn't be any worse than its original meaning of Thundering Lunatic -- and rather liking the resemblance to the English words "Powers That Be" (actually the name of a small group of demonic "freedom fighters" they had never quite managed to stamp out). 

One day, the pair had a couple of Sekhar demons over for drinks and began discussing the funniest things they had been asked for. There were that dead American guy in the wig asking for a little bit to be taken off the chin of some statue of him, and that teenage girl who apparently wanted a temporal fold so she could get her necklace back. They gave her a thousand dollars and a jewellery catalogue, wondering why she'd want a necklace that boring so badly in the first place. Honestly, high school kids. And just last week there was that ensouled vampire (poor bastard) who got his humanity back and asked if he could give it up. Something about not wanting his girlfriend to worry... they spent the rest of the night wondering what kind of ugly bitch the girl must be. Sure, they could have looked, but where's the fun in that? 

Omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, but sadly not omnicompetent. 

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End file.
